Genocide: one of the most horrific words in the language. Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it in 1944 to describe the deliberate destruction of ‘a national, ethnic, racial or religious group’.
To him, it was personal: much of his own family had been butchered in the Holocaust. Now, like so much else in our overwrought public sphere, a term coined for humanity’s most appalling atrocities has been drained of meaning. Everything from desiring a moderately sane immigration policy to refusing to call biological males ‘women’ is now labelled a ‘genocide’.
But nothing is as widespread and pernicious as its daily use as
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